There’s a macabre and notionally scientific anecdote which you may perhaps have heard before: If you take a frog and put it in a pan of boiling water it will immediately leap straight out again. However, if you take a frog and place it in a pan of cold water which you then very gradually […]

I made what is, for me, a fairly momentous decision over Christmas. For the first time in my life I’ve joined a political party – the Greens. Furthermore, equally unusually for me, as I was clearly a trendsetter (ahem), I’ve decided to explain my reasons for doing so in public. Background First, a bit about […]

I had a friendly disagreement earlier this week with fellow archivist @byekitty over Bernie Ecclestone. I made the not very original point that he has, essentially, paid a bribe to have the charge of bribery dropped without a trial. Kat responded by, quite reasonably, arguing that it’s not a bribe because what he’s done is a formal, recognised […]

Recently I made a discovery that surprised me. I had always believed that if you wrote anything on a ballot paper other than an X in the box, then this would mean that the ballot would be rejected (or spoiled) and your vote would not be counted. I get the impression that this is what most people think. […]

Last night I went to a talk at KCL by the renowned philosopher and ethicist Professor Peter Singer. Singer is probably best known as the author of ‘Animal Liberation’ and for providing the intellectual underpinning for animal rights and veganism. Currently though, his interests are centred around the idea of ‘effective altruism’, and this was […]

I finished Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma on Friday, and it’s got me thinking again about professional ethics and public engagement in the archives and records management community. After an exchange of tweets with @melindahaunton and @stefarchivist the other night, I foolishly committed to trying to put my thoughts in order in a blogpost. As background, […]

As I settle into my first paid archives/records management role (and get used to the joys of a regular two and a half hour commute to glamorous Shoeburyness), I am making an effort to find time for both networking and wider thinking about my newly chosen profession. To that end I went along to my […]